The Shape of Republican Things to Come

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Michael Lind, a FNew America Foundation, in the May edition of Politico Magazine, offers us a description of our current politics and then serves up a vision of what the politics of the intermediate future looks like.

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            Lind’s big idea is that we’ve reached the end of a period of partisan realignment that began in the early 1960s in which the Democrats became a “coalition of relatively upscale whites with racial and ethnic minorities, concentrated in an archipelago of densely populated blue cities,” while the Republican Party became “predominantly a Midwestern, white working-class party with its geographic epicenter in the South and interior West.”

            For Lind, the driving force for the shift was the “culture war” over issues of “sexuality, gender or reproduction” that took place between religious conservatives and secular liberals over the last 40 years.  Cultural conservatives migrated to the Republican party while people with a more secular outlook migrated to the Democratic party.

            For neither group of migrants was their new party a blank slate.  Newly arrived Democrats found a party focused on the working class economic issues that gave rise to Franklin Roosevelt’s Democratic coalition while newly arrived Republicans found a party with policies less favorable to them than to the affluent business-oriented partisans they would eventually displace.

            Donald Trump’s capture of the Republican party marks the beginning of what Lind calls a policy realignment in which parties shed past policy commitments they made to people who no longer control the party in favor of commitments to the people who do. 

            For example, Lind notes that for the last couple of decades, Republican politicians have called for the restructuring of Social Security, ostensibly to make the program more solvent, but more practically, to avoid having to raise taxes on the wealthy to pay for it.  Donald Trump, on the other hand has said he would leave the program exactly as it is, without benefit cutbacks or increases in the retirement age.

            Similarly, the Republican establishment, for economic and political reasons, favors a light touch on immigration policies that allow for guest and specialized workers, and some accommodation for the undocumented workers who are already here.  But Republican voters have enthusiastically supported Donald Trump’s plan to deport all undocumented aliens, build a wall along our border with Mexico and prevent Muslims from entering the U.S. until we are certain that they are not terrorists.

            Lind’s Democratic example is less convincing.  He points to a disconnect between the attitudes of Democratic voters toward free trade—53% of all Democratic voters and 67% of millennials (who, he notes tend to favor Democrats) think free trade is good for the U.S.—while Democratic politicians like Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, are currently opposing new free trade deals in solidarity with working class voters who have already migrated to the Republican party.

            When the dust settles, Lind thinks we’ll have a Republican party that will be composed of southern, western, suburban and exurban working class whites who will favor “universal contributory social insurance systems that benefit them and their families and reward work effort, but oppose “means tested programs for the poor whose benefits they and families cannot enjoy.”  They will also continue to oppose legal and illegal immigration “because of ethnic prejudice” or “fear of economic competition.”

            The Democratic coalition “will be even more of an alliance of upscale, progressive whites with blacks and Latinos, based in large and diverse cities.”  They’ll embrace free trade, oppose universal social insurance, but they “will agree to moderately redistributive taxes which pay for means tested benefits . . . for the disproportionately poor and foreign born urban workforce.”  Lind thinks they’ll support “employer-friendly, and finance-friendly libertarianism” just as the Republicans now do.

            I think Lind’s got it wrong.

            First of all, the engine that moved people from one party to the other was not the culture war. It was race.  Harry Truman nearly lost the 1948 election because of an intraparty rebellion staged by white Democratic southerners who couldn’t abide Truman’s racial policies.  The apocryphal story about Lyndon Johnson’s remarks about how the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would cost the Democrats the “Solid South” have proved prophetic in that now, Dixie has become a Republican bastion.

             It’s more historically accurate to say that the Republican Party became more culturally conservative because of its influx of southern whites fleeing a more racially diverse Democratic party than it is to say that the Republicans became the party of whites because of an influx of cultural conservatives fleeing a more secular Democratic party.  The culture war didn’t get started in earnest until at least the Carter Administration over 10 years after the southern exodus from the Democratic party began.

            Second, Lind doesn’t properly account for our changing demographics.  He discounts the idea that whites will become a minority in the foreseeable future.  Most of the population growth projected in the nonwhite population will come from Hispanics, who, he notes, are now beginning to count themselves as white and Hispanic. “If increasing numbers of Hispanics identify as white and their descendants are defined as “white” in government statistics,” he argues, there may be a white majority in the U.S. throughout the 21^st century.”  Seeing themselves as white, Lind intimates, they may very well feel comfortable moving to the Republican party.

            The problem with this second argument is that it fails to accept the fact that a significant proportion of whites simply don’t accept anyone who isn’t actually white and protestant as a legitimate American.  And until they do, it’s not likely that the voters behind the Republican party are going to adopt the kinds of policies that will make people of Hispanic ancestry want to support Republican politicians regardless of how they identify themselves to the Census Bureau.

            That racism or xenophobia, of course, will at least lock the Republican party out of the White House indefinitely if it continues to define itself with policies in opposition to people without the same pedigrees its white members have.  It remains to be seen whether an American political party without a realistic chance of winning the Presidency can survive as a local or Congress-based party.   

             It seems to me to be far more likely that sooner or later, strategic politicians in the Republican party will have little choice but to drop their dependence on disgruntled whites.  They will have no choice but to become advocates of policies that can attract non-whites on some ground that also appeal to whites.  At the very least, they’ll have to stop opposing policies that offer assistance to people whose recent ethnicity doesn’t derive from northern and western Europe.

            If that happens, the new group of voters Republicans need to compete for the presidency will displace the current shrinking core group of racially motived Republican whites.  Those new voters—the younger ones in particular—are likely to have little interest in relitigating the culture war issues that Lind describes.

            With race finally neutralized, we’ll hear fewer arguments against redistribution in favor of the “undeserving poor.”  Without culture on the menu, the electorate can spend more time thinking about what a Supreme Court nominee’s attitude about the ability of the state to control concentrated economic power and less time worrying about his or her attitudes about abortion, religion and LBGT rights.  There will be less to distract voters from the economic agenda of the people who are currently bankrolling both political parties.

            And maybe, just maybe, we’ll be able to negotiate a social compact that enables us to share the bounty of this country fairly, enables every person to make the most of his or her life, and makes us more of a nation.